The robot hand is designed to mimic the kinematics of a human hand, including the thumb and palm

Nick Wilson

This article was taken from the November 2013 issue of Wired
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Shadow
Robot, a London-based robotics company, has developed a robot
hand that has 24 joints driven by 20 motors. With such a wide range
of movement, it can pick up even tricky objects, such as
pencils.

During summer of this year, the company connected one of the
hands to an extremely precise 3D sensor. Developed by a European
Commission-funded project, the sensor lets the hand effectively
"see" what to grasp by scanning the environment in front of it.
Future applications could include the hand picking up a swab
located by the sensor and using it to test a potentially
contaminated package. "We've spent a lot of time looking at how we
can put robots in places where humans currently go, which we as a
society would much rather people didn't have to," explains Rich
Walker, Shadow Robot's MD. "So the classic
'difficult, dirty and dangerous'."

Walker says the original plan for the TACO (Three-Dimensional
Adaptive Camera with Object Detection and Foveation) was to make a
simple 3D-sensor -- "and then the Kinect came out". So the research
group, which consists of seven European partners, turned up the
power. The laser's 2kW peak output allows the sensor to recognise
objects smaller than the Kinect can resolve.

An infrared beam shines on five oscillating micro-mirrors. It
bounces off the objects in front of it and is detected by a second
sensor that measures the time it took to return, and calculates the
depth of the surfaces. Using object-recognition systems, a computer
can match a detected object to an item in its database, then
instruct the robot arm to handle it appropriately. But with such
power, it's not to be toyed with. "If the beam stops scanning,
whatever it's pointing at will start to burn," says Walker. "Things
catch fire with this laser."